Pervasively unreliable Time Warner Cable surprised its New York customers with a postcard in the mail declaring they'll have to pay $4 to rent the cable modem you need for its piss poor internet service. And now TWC is being sued for the stunt.

The only thing worse than paying out the tuchus for unreliable internet from Time Warner Cable and…
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Collectively, lawyers claim the fee should cost TWC customers $40 million a month. Calling violation of consumer fraud laws, lawyers say the way Time Warner went about adding the fee is bogus:

"It's a massive hi-tech consumer fraud accomplished by low-tech methods," Steven L. Witles, one of the lawyers, said. "Send customers confusing notice of the fee in a junk mail postcard they'll throw in the garbage, sock them with a $500 million dollar a year rate hike, then announce on your website that customer satisfaction is your #1 priority. That's some way to deliver satisfaction."

In summary, it was like getting one of those birthday cards in the mail from Baskin Robbins, but instead of giving you free ice cream, you'd be allowed to purchase a melty day old cone of the worst flavor. Two different suits were filed—one in New York and another in New Jersey—seeking injunctions to ban the company from allowing forcing customers to lease old, obsolete POS modems. [Gothamist]